Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

 ingtaer wrote:
I think you are arguing at cross purposes. Iron Captain is clearly talking of the limits on Archaeology by itself, whilst you are talking about the cross discipline of that with History.

I'm not sure that's the case. I stated explicitly that I believe archaeologists are obliged to be interdisciplinarians, and Iron Captain has disputed the ability of even interdisciplinary study to produce precision dating.

nfe wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

nfe wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

Exact dates in archaeology should usually be taken with a big pile of salt.
Unless it is very recent archaeology establishing an exact date or year that something happened is difficult and sometimes impossible. Generally, archaeologists will give period ranges rather than exact dates. The farther back you go generally the larger these ranges get. For example, the Bronze Age collapse on mainland Greece happened in LHIIIB (Late Helladic period III, B), which is somewhere around 1300-1190 BC. Cline, when he uses the year 1177, is doing so for dramatic effect (it produces a nice headline for your writing to get noticed) rather than meaning to say: It happened in exactly this year. He just picked a nice sounding year that lies in the approximate range during which the collapse occured.

Not sure I agree here. Usually when we give precise dates we do so on solid evidence. In Middle Bronze Anatolia, for example, we can put exact years on loads of events. We can do the same thing in Iron Age Israel. Sure it requires the incorproration of historical texts and is not purely drawn from archaeological data, but any archaeologist who isn’t an interdisciplinary researcher is a bad archaeologist.

Sure, enquire as to where the date came from, but if someone is using an exact date in a peer-reviewed work, there’s probably a very good reason.

I disagree. The dating methods we use as archaeologists can not produce exact years (and as I was told in my very first lecture on dating, the obsession with wanting an exact year should be dropped anyway, since it is very trivial).
We can date using either historical records, which are inherently unreliable (due to issues such as lack of context, interpretation, potential biases etc.) and can not be independently verified. Therefore, dates derived in such a manner, while useful to provide a frame of reference, can not stand up to scientific scrutiny.
Of course, we also have scientific dating methods, and they are incredibly important as they transformed archaeology from antiquarianism into a scientific discipline. But, scientific dating methods such as radiocarbon and dendrochronology also always have an inherent element of uncertainty, which is why they produce date ranges and not exact years.
Plenty of people use exact dates in their writing, but as I said, that should be taken with salt. It is virtually impossible to proof an exact year something happened in a rigorous, scientific manner. Sure, we can use dates based on historical records, but that is what historians do, but that is not a scientific discipline. Which does not mean that is not useful, but it does mean that there is no certainty. There is no such thing as 'solid evidence' for exact dates.
So, if someone uses an exact year in a peer-reviewed work, then he/she is probably doing so for a good reason, but he/she is either writing about more recent history or the reason is something else than "I know for certain it happened exactly in this year". Like Cline for example, who uses 1177BC despite the fact that the Bronze Age collapse did not happen in precisely that year, but rather as a general indicator of 'it happened roughly around this time'. An archaeologist who claims to know with certainty the exact date of any event in the Bronze Age is a bad archaeologist. Luckily, I have never met any who claimed such things. I'd say we are pretty well aware of the limitations of dates.

With all due respect, I don't think you're sufficiently expert in the periods I gave as examples. We are precise in Middle Bronze Age Anatolia because we can use the 24,000+ texts in association with the archaeological data to put extremely tight ranges (to the point of a few years at worst) to, for instance, the destructions of Kültepe Lower Town phases II and Ib in in early second millennium BCE. Similarly, we can date destruction layers of several of southern Israel's tells during Sennacherib's invasion of Shephelah to exactly 701 BCE through the corroboration of a range of historical accounts alongside the material sealed by the destruction horizons. You are entirely correct that C14 gives ranges and that dendro, whilst giving exact years for the cutting down of a tree (provided we're working in areas with sufficiently robust master sequences), does not give us a positive date for the use or reuse of its timber in a structure, but to say that there is no situation where archaeologists, with sufficient interdisciplinary evidentiary bases, can use precise is to be unfamiliar with the evidence. To be so bold as to claim that anyone who does is a bad archaeologist is to dismiss, for instance, every leading figure in Anatolian Bronze Age and Levantine Iron Age archaeology. Ask your lecturers if they think, for instance, that Fikri Kulakoğlu or Israel Finkelstein are bad archaeologists, or whether Nicholas Postgate and Mogens Trolle Larsen are bad Assyriologists.


EDIT: I should add the caveat that obviously should some paradigm shifting discovery appear, that exact dates posited with confidence are subject to change, but that does not undermine their use. That's just the nature of all scientific enquiry.

Wow, they have found that many written sources there? For the Bronze Age? Wow.! That is pretty cool. I kinda want to move to Leiden now. There they focus more on the Near East... Our institute is specialised in the Mediterranean and North-Western Europe, areas for which Bronze Age written records are... meagre, to say the least. We only rarely get (guest) lectures on other regions. Two of the profs do a lot of work in the Near East, but they are zoological and botanical experts respectively, so their lectures tend to focus on those aspects for the most part.
Anyways, I am very happy to be proven wrong in this. I did not know you could get dates with such a level of precision anywhere in the Bronze Age.

Still, there is the problem with written records that they are inherently unreliable and can not be tested (and are therefore unscientific), which is a problem for a lot of traditional dates in the Classical and early Medieval periods of Northern Europe, who are often based on just a single written record made centuries after the actual event (which then ends up not corresponding to the archaeological record). But if you have multiple written records that should reduce the margin of error and increase the reliability.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

Spoiler:

nfe wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

nfe wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

Exact dates in archaeology should usually be taken with a big pile of salt.
Unless it is very recent archaeology establishing an exact date or year that something happened is difficult and sometimes impossible. Generally, archaeologists will give period ranges rather than exact dates. The farther back you go generally the larger these ranges get. For example, the Bronze Age collapse on mainland Greece happened in LHIIIB (Late Helladic period III, B), which is somewhere around 1300-1190 BC. Cline, when he uses the year 1177, is doing so for dramatic effect (it produces a nice headline for your writing to get noticed) rather than meaning to say: It happened in exactly this year. He just picked a nice sounding year that lies in the approximate range during which the collapse occured.

Not sure I agree here. Usually when we give precise dates we do so on solid evidence. In Middle Bronze Anatolia, for example, we can put exact years on loads of events. We can do the same thing in Iron Age Israel. Sure it requires the incorproration of historical texts and is not purely drawn from archaeological data, but any archaeologist who isn’t an interdisciplinary researcher is a bad archaeologist.

Sure, enquire as to where the date came from, but if someone is using an exact date in a peer-reviewed work, there’s probably a very good reason.

I disagree. The dating methods we use as archaeologists can not produce exact years (and as I was told in my very first lecture on dating, the obsession with wanting an exact year should be dropped anyway, since it is very trivial).
We can date using either historical records, which are inherently unreliable (due to issues such as lack of context, interpretation, potential biases etc.) and can not be independently verified. Therefore, dates derived in such a manner, while useful to provide a frame of reference, can not stand up to scientific scrutiny.
Of course, we also have scientific dating methods, and they are incredibly important as they transformed archaeology from antiquarianism into a scientific discipline. But, scientific dating methods such as radiocarbon and dendrochronology also always have an inherent element of uncertainty, which is why they produce date ranges and not exact years.
Plenty of people use exact dates in their writing, but as I said, that should be taken with salt. It is virtually impossible to proof an exact year something happened in a rigorous, scientific manner. Sure, we can use dates based on historical records, but that is what historians do, but that is not a scientific discipline. Which does not mean that is not useful, but it does mean that there is no certainty. There is no such thing as 'solid evidence' for exact dates.
So, if someone uses an exact year in a peer-reviewed work, then he/she is probably doing so for a good reason, but he/she is either writing about more recent history or the reason is something else than "I know for certain it happened exactly in this year". Like Cline for example, who uses 1177BC despite the fact that the Bronze Age collapse did not happen in precisely that year, but rather as a general indicator of 'it happened roughly around this time'. An archaeologist who claims to know with certainty the exact date of any event in the Bronze Age is a bad archaeologist. Luckily, I have never met any who claimed such things. I'd say we are pretty well aware of the limitations of dates.

With all due respect, I don't think you're sufficiently expert in the periods I gave as examples. We are precise in Middle Bronze Age Anatolia because we can use the 24,000+ texts in association with the archaeological data to put extremely tight ranges (to the point of a few years at worst) to, for instance, the destructions of Kültepe Lower Town phases II and Ib in in early second millennium BCE. Similarly, we can date destruction layers of several of southern Israel's tells during Sennacherib's invasion of Shephelah to exactly 701 BCE through the corroboration of a range of historical accounts alongside the material sealed by the destruction horizons. You are entirely correct that C14 gives ranges and that dendro, whilst giving exact years for the cutting down of a tree (provided we're working in areas with sufficiently robust master sequences), does not give us a positive date for the use or reuse of its timber in a structure, but to say that there is no situation where archaeologists, with sufficient interdisciplinary evidentiary bases, can use precise is to be unfamiliar with the evidence. To be so bold as to claim that anyone who does is a bad archaeologist is to dismiss, for instance, every leading figure in Anatolian Bronze Age and Levantine Iron Age archaeology. Ask your lecturers if they think, for instance, that Fikri Kulakoğlu or Israel Finkelstein are bad archaeologists, or whether Nicholas Postgate and Mogens Trolle Larsen are bad Assyriologists.


EDIT: I should add the caveat that obviously should some paradigm shifting discovery appear, that exact dates posited with confidence are subject to change, but that does not undermine their use. That's just the nature of all scientific enquiry.

Wow, they have found that many written sources there? For the Bronze Age? Wow.! That is pretty cool. I kinda want to move to Leiden now. There they focus more on the Near East... Our institute is specialised in the Mediterranean and North-Western Europe, areas for which Bronze Age written records are... meagre, to say the least. We only rarely get (guest) lectures on other regions. Two of the profs do a lot of work in the Near East, but they are zoological and botanical experts respectively, so their lectures tend to focus on those aspects for the most part.
Anyways, I am very happy to be proven wrong in this. I did not know you could get dates with such a level of precision anywhere in the Bronze Age.

Still, there is the problem with written records that they are inherently unreliable and can not be tested (and are therefore unscientific), which is a problem for a lot of traditional dates in the Classical and early Medieval periods of Northern Europe, who are often based on just a single written record made centuries after the actual event (which then ends up not corresponding to the archaeological record). But if you have multiple written records that should reduce the margin of error and increase the reliability.

Yes, the textual corpus of the Bronze Age Near East is vast. Clearly it is variable - Central Anatolia in the Middle Bronze is brilliant, but Western Anatolia on the Aegean at the same time is rubbish. Yes, Northern Europe is poor when not occupied by Rome, basically. We have very secure dates for activity on Hadrian's and the Antonine walls, for instance, sometimes down to the month or week concerning troop and officer movements, but no one else was so keen on records in the region until much later. In the Bronze Age Near East people really loved to put eponym-list-derived dates on things, and we have those securely dated via cosmological events that they and other sources which we can synchronise reference. We have pretty solid guesses as to the months certain letters (usually husbands trying to justify why they haven't gotten something to their wife due to the snow or whatever - no seriously) in the 18-17th centuries BCE were sent.

nfe wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

Spoiler:

nfe wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

nfe wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

Exact dates in archaeology should usually be taken with a big pile of salt.
Unless it is very recent archaeology establishing an exact date or year that something happened is difficult and sometimes impossible. Generally, archaeologists will give period ranges rather than exact dates. The farther back you go generally the larger these ranges get. For example, the Bronze Age collapse on mainland Greece happened in LHIIIB (Late Helladic period III, B), which is somewhere around 1300-1190 BC. Cline, when he uses the year 1177, is doing so for dramatic effect (it produces a nice headline for your writing to get noticed) rather than meaning to say: It happened in exactly this year. He just picked a nice sounding year that lies in the approximate range during which the collapse occured.

Not sure I agree here. Usually when we give precise dates we do so on solid evidence. In Middle Bronze Anatolia, for example, we can put exact years on loads of events. We can do the same thing in Iron Age Israel. Sure it requires the incorproration of historical texts and is not purely drawn from archaeological data, but any archaeologist who isn’t an interdisciplinary researcher is a bad archaeologist.

Sure, enquire as to where the date came from, but if someone is using an exact date in a peer-reviewed work, there’s probably a very good reason.

I disagree. The dating methods we use as archaeologists can not produce exact years (and as I was told in my very first lecture on dating, the obsession with wanting an exact year should be dropped anyway, since it is very trivial).
We can date using either historical records, which are inherently unreliable (due to issues such as lack of context, interpretation, potential biases etc.) and can not be independently verified. Therefore, dates derived in such a manner, while useful to provide a frame of reference, can not stand up to scientific scrutiny.
Of course, we also have scientific dating methods, and they are incredibly important as they transformed archaeology from antiquarianism into a scientific discipline. But, scientific dating methods such as radiocarbon and dendrochronology also always have an inherent element of uncertainty, which is why they produce date ranges and not exact years.
Plenty of people use exact dates in their writing, but as I said, that should be taken with salt. It is virtually impossible to proof an exact year something happened in a rigorous, scientific manner. Sure, we can use dates based on historical records, but that is what historians do, but that is not a scientific discipline. Which does not mean that is not useful, but it does mean that there is no certainty. There is no such thing as 'solid evidence' for exact dates.
So, if someone uses an exact year in a peer-reviewed work, then he/she is probably doing so for a good reason, but he/she is either writing about more recent history or the reason is something else than "I know for certain it happened exactly in this year". Like Cline for example, who uses 1177BC despite the fact that the Bronze Age collapse did not happen in precisely that year, but rather as a general indicator of 'it happened roughly around this time'. An archaeologist who claims to know with certainty the exact date of any event in the Bronze Age is a bad archaeologist. Luckily, I have never met any who claimed such things. I'd say we are pretty well aware of the limitations of dates.

With all due respect, I don't think you're sufficiently expert in the periods I gave as examples. We are precise in Middle Bronze Age Anatolia because we can use the 24,000+ texts in association with the archaeological data to put extremely tight ranges (to the point of a few years at worst) to, for instance, the destructions of Kültepe Lower Town phases II and Ib in in early second millennium BCE. Similarly, we can date destruction layers of several of southern Israel's tells during Sennacherib's invasion of Shephelah to exactly 701 BCE through the corroboration of a range of historical accounts alongside the material sealed by the destruction horizons. You are entirely correct that C14 gives ranges and that dendro, whilst giving exact years for the cutting down of a tree (provided we're working in areas with sufficiently robust master sequences), does not give us a positive date for the use or reuse of its timber in a structure, but to say that there is no situation where archaeologists, with sufficient interdisciplinary evidentiary bases, can use precise is to be unfamiliar with the evidence. To be so bold as to claim that anyone who does is a bad archaeologist is to dismiss, for instance, every leading figure in Anatolian Bronze Age and Levantine Iron Age archaeology. Ask your lecturers if they think, for instance, that Fikri Kulakoğlu or Israel Finkelstein are bad archaeologists, or whether Nicholas Postgate and Mogens Trolle Larsen are bad Assyriologists.


EDIT: I should add the caveat that obviously should some paradigm shifting discovery appear, that exact dates posited with confidence are subject to change, but that does not undermine their use. That's just the nature of all scientific enquiry.

Wow, they have found that many written sources there? For the Bronze Age? Wow.! That is pretty cool. I kinda want to move to Leiden now. There they focus more on the Near East... Our institute is specialised in the Mediterranean and North-Western Europe, areas for which Bronze Age written records are... meagre, to say the least. We only rarely get (guest) lectures on other regions. Two of the profs do a lot of work in the Near East, but they are zoological and botanical experts respectively, so their lectures tend to focus on those aspects for the most part.
Anyways, I am very happy to be proven wrong in this. I did not know you could get dates with such a level of precision anywhere in the Bronze Age.

Still, there is the problem with written records that they are inherently unreliable and can not be tested (and are therefore unscientific), which is a problem for a lot of traditional dates in the Classical and early Medieval periods of Northern Europe, who are often based on just a single written record made centuries after the actual event (which then ends up not corresponding to the archaeological record). But if you have multiple written records that should reduce the margin of error and increase the reliability.

Yes, the textual corpus of the Bronze Age Near East is vast. Clearly it is variable - Central Anatolia in the Middle Bronze is brilliant, but Western Anatolia on the Aegean at the same time is rubbish. Yes, Northern Europe is poor when not occupied by Rome, basically. We have very secure dates for activity on Hadrian's and the Antonine walls, for instance, sometimes down to the month or week concerning troop and officer movements, but no one else was so keen on records in the region until much later. In the Bronze Age Near East people really loved to put eponym-list-derived dates on things, and we have those securely dated via cosmological events that they and other sources which we can synchronise reference. We have pretty solid guesses as to the months certain letters (usually husbands trying to justify why they haven't gotten something to their wife due to the snow or whatever - no seriously) in the 18-17th centuries BCE were sent.

That is pretty awesome. Here I was thinking they just produced storage accounts and overly long flattery for their rulers over there. Pretty nifty to use cosmological phenomena for cross-referencing too.\

The Bronze Age Aegean by contrast is pretty poor in written records. It is not that the Mycenaeans or Minoans never wrote anything down, but the Mycenaeans liked to re-use old tablets, and so we only have records of the time just before the destruction of the palaces. And the Minoans... Well the Minoans wrote everything down in a language that is completely incomprehensible. Which is a shame since we have hundreds of Minoan tablets filled with undecipherable information. I am willing to bet it is just boring storage accounts though

So the paper back version is out in bookstores with a couple of added pages. I picked it up and read it.

Makes me want to dig into the period more and it has a extensive bibliography. However, I am not convinced that Bronze Age societies were so tightly linked that the end of trade ties would cause mass collapse over the course of a century. The idea it was many elements combining makes much more sense.

Perhaps this may be of interest, although it not likely to be as academically rigorous as Iron Captain's materials. One thing I did take away from that issue was that in a number of cases, it was just the Palace civilization that collapsed, not the rest of society. That argues against foreign invasion, as why would an external enemy spare the homes of the nobles and commoners while just burning the palace. That seems like the nobles and commoners united and overthrew the monarchy finding its demands too burdensome in the changed economic environment.

Ancient Warfare IV.4 with 'Darkness descends'
https://www.karwansaraypublishers.com/issue-iv-4-aug-sept-2010-pdf.html

So a Rosetta stone for the Minoan language would be a priceless artifact, I imagine

 Easy E wrote:
So the paper back version is out in bookstores with a couple of added pages. I picked it up and read it.

Makes me want to dig into the period more and it has a extensive bibliography. However, I am not convinced that Bronze Age societies were so tightly linked that the end of trade ties would cause mass collapse over the course of a century. The idea it was many elements combining makes much more sense.

One cause provokes or enables another.

A massive volcanic eruption reduces harvests leading to the possibility of famine, and reaction against governments, who were responsible for religion and the protection of the people from the wrath of the gods.

Desperate people are more likely to use violence to get what they need and go pirating.

Weaker central government leads to less protection against piracy and invasion.

The loss of trade hurts the overall generation of wealth, causing more poverty.

And so on.

Bran Dawri wrote:
So a Rosetta stone for the Minoan language would be a priceless artifact, I imagine

Oh boy it would. That is the ultimate wet dream of any archaeologist in this field.

How many ancient languages have proved possible to decipher using decryption techniques, rather than comparison with known texts?

A worthy thread to necro.

Time to breath new life into it.

Accurate historical dating. An opinion.

Yes we can be year accurate with ancient histotical dating, but we need a reference point we can rely on. thankfully history and astronomy combine to bring us some. Solar eclipses.

Solar eclipses are mjor spooky events that enter annals. The timeline of the Hellenic period can be accurately timestamped due to a solar eclipse that occured in Asia Minor as reported by Herodotus. Furthermore scholars of the time predicted the eclipse and its timing was used to provide a huge morale debuff scynchonised to take place with the eclipse.

Afterr all if you are a soldier and you are taunted by the enemy that Apollo and Zeus hate your tyrant and if you die for him you are going straight to Tartarus, and the victory is preordained by the gods so much that Helios will shut his eyes to your impending doom.
Thren the sun goes dark in the midle of the afternoon and the enemy charges. What would you do?.....

Events like this get recorded and much of the other timeline is extrapolated from these points.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eclipse_of_Thales

We can calculate with high accuracy when solar eclipses occurred in the ancient Middle East, they occur with full intensity abut once a century per place. All we then need to do is look for portents of darkening skies in the written records of the time, which were extensive and cross reference this to which year of which ruler the event occured.

Not every one will be preduced like Thales of Miletus, though his was not necessarily the first calculation, its the first known.
But even unpredicted eclipses will be highly significant.

I think an eclipse search is something ancient historians should be on e lookout for.

I believe stone tablets should be laser scanned and digitised en masse to aid future scholars make pattern searches. We have the tech for this now, both for data storage and for pattern analysis.

If we did this the secrets of the Hittites and Babylonians would likely quickly open to us. A coherent chronology would be a good early goal.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
How many ancient languages have proved possible to decipher using decryption techniques, rather than comparison with known texts?

Not many. Linear B (the Mycenaean language) was deciphered without bilingual artifacts, which was possible because it proved to be closely related to Greek. For Linear A (the Minoan) language, the same techniques have yielded only gibberish. Breaking the code of an alphabet or any other writing system is possible with a lot of work. But when you don't know what kind of language has been 'encrypted' by this writing system it is impossible since you can't understand the results you are getting. It is basically a double encryption where the results you get out of deciphering the writing system are themselves encrypted. Which makes it impossible to know whether your decryption of the writing system was actually correct or not. So you get into a situation where you can not decipher the writing system until you decipher the language but you can not decipher the language because you have not deciphered the writing system.

Most of the evidence presented does paint a picture that the Palace economy was tightly linked, but it is not clear from what I read that this economy "trickled down" to other classes.

Also, it is important to note that the "palace" was the literary hub, and that went dark. As Ancestral Hamster points out the people keep going, but it looks like in some cases they were different cultural groups or possibly a hybridized version based on material goods left at the sites. Many cities in the Hittite kingdoms appear to simply be abandoned or like in Mycenean are rebuilt with much smaller populations.

Another interesting point is the absence of evidence for disease or plague. There is evidence for climate change, drought, natural disaster, warfare, and famine..... but not plague. That is interesting.

Plague is a product of an agricultural economy which ties together several different species, leading to noosis, combined with lack of hygiene in a high population density.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Plague is a product of an agricultural economy which ties together several different species, leading to noosis, combined with lack of hygiene in a high population density.

Well, perhaps the population density was not high enough, or the agriculture economy was mostly human muscle powered? Therefore, little disease? Is that the thought process?

 Easy E wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Plague is a product of an agricultural economy which ties together several different species, leading to noosis, combined with lack of hygiene in a high population density.

Well, perhaps the population density was not high enough, or the agriculture economy was mostly human muscle powered? Therefore, little disease? Is that the thought process?

Plague also occurs in low density populations, though its transmission is obviously slower. And even good sanitation only does so much to prevent plague since it is spread by rats and fleas, which live everywhere regardless of how clean a place is, though bad hygiene conditions definitely make outbreaks more likely of course because of the increased number of vermin.

Anyways, there is no evidence yet that major plague outbreaks were a thing back then. The virulent form of y. pestis is a relatively recent evolution and the first major outbreak appears to have only been in the 6th century AD (although it has been found sporadically in individuals before that time, including from the Bronze Age).

Disease can be practically ruled out as a factor in the Bronze Age collapse, and I think in societal collapse in general. All diseases do is kill people, and killing people, even lots of people, is not enough on its own to make a society collapse. Case in point: The Black Death killed a whopping 30-60% of the entire population of Europe, yet societies weren't even close to collapsing.

 Iron_Captain wrote:
Plague also occurs in low density populations, though its transmission is obviously slower. And even good sanitation only does so much to prevent plague since it is spread by rats and fleas, which live everywhere regardless of how clean a place is, though bad hygiene conditions definitely make outbreaks more likely of course because of the increased number of vermin.

To elaborate on this, there are some regions where plagues would be cyclical, passing through low intensity outbreaks in small populations and then jumping to large populations who would face high intensity outbreaks. This occurred in North America during the Colonial period (it had a substantial effect on the outcome of Pontiac's War), and in the Middle East throughout most of the Caliphate era. People who survived either could become carriers and unleash the disease either way during routine contact, trading, special events, passing through etc.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

Bran Dawri wrote:
So a Rosetta stone for the Minoan language would be a priceless artifact, I imagine

Oh boy it would. That is the ultimate wet dream of any archaeologist in this field.

And I must guess that they uses pictograms similar to Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Chinese.
Alphabets are much newer.

Orlanth wrote:

We can calculate with high accuracy when solar eclipses occurred in the ancient Middle East, they occur with full intensity abut once a century per place. All we then need to do is look for portents of darkening skies in the written records of the time, which were extensive and cross reference this to which year of which ruler the event occured.

It's a bit more complex than this makes it seem. There are lots of points that we can nail down, but synchronising annals is more difficult, and various sources are more difficult to deal with than others. Middle Bronze Age Anatolia and North Mesopotamia is solid (albeit with three competing chronologies - high, middle, and low - most people support middle these days), for instance, but it falls apart with the rise of the Hittites who don't date texts with eponyms. The Iron age Levant, the most excavated place on the planet with the most heavily studied texts in history has four competing chronooogies even though we have events that we can place in time very accurately via an abundance of external texts.

I think an eclipse search is something ancient historians should be on e lookout for.

They are. Don't fear. People get very excited about references to eclipses for exactly this reason.

I believe stone tablets should be laser scanned and digitised en masse to aid future scholars make pattern searches. We have the tech for this now, both for data storage and for pattern analysis.

If we did this the secrets of the Hittites and Babylonians would likely quickly open to us. A coherent chronology would be a good early goal.

I presume you mean clay tablets. Hittites and Babylonians only really wrote victory stelae on stone. In fact Broze age annals are pretty much all on clay throughout the near east insofar as i'm aware (I don't deal a lot with the late bronze, but clay is the ubiquitous material for writing other than in monumental contexts. Laser scanning them doesn't achieve much that good photographs or RTI don't anyway unless they are very seriously degraded. They are systematically recorded and translated with commentary in any case. What exactly do you mean by pattern analysis?

Lone Cat wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

Bran Dawri wrote:
So a Rosetta stone for the Minoan language would be a priceless artifact, I imagine

Oh boy it would. That is the ultimate wet dream of any archaeologist in this field.

Pfft. I want a note telling me what the boot-vessels from Kültepe are!

And I must guess that they uses pictograms similar to Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Chinese.
Alphabets are much newer.

They cross over quite a lot. There are alphabetic systems in use in Egypt for centuries whilst Minoans were writing Linear A. Pictographic systems in the Levant carried on whilst everyone around them was using alphabetic systems or cuneiform and so on. Alphabets do rise later than pictographic writing systems but there's not a big difference in use.

 Lone Cat wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

Bran Dawri wrote:
So a Rosetta stone for the Minoan language would be a priceless artifact, I imagine

Oh boy it would. That is the ultimate wet dream of any archaeologist in this field.

And I must guess that they uses pictograms similar to Egyptians, Mesopotamians, and Chinese.
Alphabets are much newer.

The Minoans did indeed also use a logographic script which has been termed "Cretan hieroglyphs". This writing system is also undeciphered and was used alongside Linear A for a long time until Linear A fully replaces the hieroglyphs. Linear A likely was a partially logographic writing system as well (it appears to have both syllabic and logographic signs, similar to Linear B), and because of the the fact that several Linear A marks appear to have hieroglyphic counterparts it is theorised that the Linear A writing system evolved from the Cretan hieroglyphic writing sytem.
The first true alphabet did not come around until after the Dark Ages that followed the Bronze Age collapse, when the Greeks started started using a modified version of the Phoenician abjad (an abjad is an alphabet but without characters to represent vowels) by adding characters to represent vowels (which is important for being able to write the Greek language). However, alphabetic systems (in the form of abjads) were in use in the Near East and Egypt simultaneously with logographic scripts, so it is not as simple as "alphabets are newer than logographic writing systems". That really only holds true for Ancient Greece. In many other parts of the world logographic and alphabetic scripts were and continue to be used together.

 LordofHats wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:
Plague also occurs in low density populations, though its transmission is obviously slower. And even good sanitation only does so much to prevent plague since it is spread by rats and fleas, which live everywhere regardless of how clean a place is, though bad hygiene conditions definitely make outbreaks more likely of course because of the increased number of vermin.

To elaborate on this, there are some regions where plagues would be cyclical, passing through low intensity outbreaks in small populations and then jumping to large populations who would face high intensity outbreaks. This occurred in North America during the Colonial period (it had a substantial effect on the outcome of Pontiac's War), and in the Middle East throughout most of the Caliphate era. People who survived either could become carriers and unleash the disease either way during routine contact, trading, special events, passing through etc.

IIRC correctly, prior to this period there is reference to plague hitting the Hittites population centers but that was pre-1177. It was suspected by the Hittites themselves that the disease came from Egyptian prisoners captured in battle.I believe this tidbit was captured in some letters from the Hittite kings to Urgat, but I may be mistaken.

Around 1177B.C. similar scraps of literary evidence of plague does not exist, and no other physical evidence (mass graves, corpses with disease signs, etc.) seem to exist.

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Easy E wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Plague is a product of an agricultural economy which ties together several different species, leading to noosis, combined with lack of hygiene in a high population density.

Well, perhaps the population density was not high enough, or the agriculture economy was mostly human muscle powered? Therefore, little disease? Is that the thought process?

Plague also occurs in low density populations, though its transmission is obviously slower. And even good sanitation only does so much to prevent plague since it is spread by rats and fleas, which live everywhere regardless of how clean a place is, though bad hygiene conditions definitely make outbreaks more likely of course because of the increased number of vermin.

Anyways, there is no evidence yet that major plague outbreaks were a thing back then. The virulent form of y. pestis is a relatively recent evolution and the first major outbreak appears to have only been in the 6th century AD (although it has been found sporadically in individuals before that time, including from the Bronze Age).

Disease can be practically ruled out as a factor in the Bronze Age collapse, and I think in societal collapse in general. All diseases do is kill people, and killing people, even lots of people, is not enough on its own to make a society collapse. Case in point: The Black Death killed a whopping 30-60% of the entire population of Europe, yet societies weren't even close to collapsing.

It's probably helpful when you have more people in general. If a country with 5 million people loses 50% of the population, you still have 2.5 million people and likely still have enough of each social/economic strata to function. If a town of 1000 people loses 50% of its population you have a higher chance of having lost a few vital social/economic strata. % of population lost as a tipping point depends on the actual numbers because the point of collapse is more tied to actual numbers and not a %. Its like how the population number required to maintain tech levels to create something as advanced as a Tank is estimated at the specific number of 1 million and not a %. If you still have a million people from a decent spread of society, you can maintain and sustain modern technology. Less and you regress, the actual % of people who died in the calamity was irrelevant.

We wouldn't be looking for plague specifically either. A currently unknown disease could still be a factor in weakening the civilization. It could be a disease that is now non-existent because everybody is immune to it, due to those that weren't being wiped out. Heck, it could even be something silly like the Common Cold. Trivial today, life threatening back then. Some foreigner brings in a new disease which kills a small, but vital, portion of the population(like the ruling class who inhabits cities on a permanent basis and thus is more vulnerable to disease) which causes larger government to collapse. The bulk of the population living in small villages carry on life as normal, they're just no longer are part of larger societies.

Medieval Europe also had more safeguards working to prevent the collapse of society. A shared and organized religion which had a shared textual language(Latin) that was independent of the different governments who were fastidious about saving and recording texts, thus preserving knowledge and history. If there wasn't such a large network of monasteries and churches which kept the ruling classes literate it is likely that the Middle Ages might well indeed have seen a total collapse of civilization like the Bronze Age. First the Roman Empire collapses, and then a series of plagues sweeps through.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:

 Easy E wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Plague is a product of an agricultural economy which ties together several different species, leading to noosis, combined with lack of hygiene in a high population density.

Well, perhaps the population density was not high enough, or the agriculture economy was mostly human muscle powered? Therefore, little disease? Is that the thought process?

Plague also occurs in low density populations, though its transmission is obviously slower. And even good sanitation only does so much to prevent plague since it is spread by rats and fleas, which live everywhere regardless of how clean a place is, though bad hygiene conditions definitely make outbreaks more likely of course because of the increased number of vermin.

Anyways, there is no evidence yet that major plague outbreaks were a thing back then. The virulent form of y. pestis is a relatively recent evolution and the first major outbreak appears to have only been in the 6th century AD (although it has been found sporadically in individuals before that time, including from the Bronze Age).

Disease can be practically ruled out as a factor in the Bronze Age collapse, and I think in societal collapse in general. All diseases do is kill people, and killing people, even lots of people, is not enough on its own to make a society collapse. Case in point: The Black Death killed a whopping 30-60% of the entire population of Europe, yet societies weren't even close to collapsing.

It's probably helpful when you have more people in general. If a country with 5 million people loses 50% of the population, you still have 2.5 million people and likely still have enough of each social/economic strata to function. If a town of 1000 people loses 50% of its population you have a higher chance of having lost a few vital social/economic strata. % of population lost as a tipping point depends on the actual numbers because the point of collapse is more tied to actual numbers and not a %. Its like how the population number required to maintain tech levels to create something as advanced as a Tank is estimated at the specific number of 1 million and not a %. If you still have a million people from a decent spread of society, you can maintain and sustain modern technology. Less and you regress, the actual % of people who died in the calamity was irrelevant.

A town of 1000 people doesn't require the same kind of resources as a country of 5 million people though. For example, they don't need those tanks. And more importantly, towns are always part of a larger society which can keep the town running. So let's say your town just lost its last blacksmith, you can bet a blacksmith from a neighbouring town will be moving in soon. In Russia, there are plenty of towns that have lost up to 80% or even more of their population in and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but they still keep going even though sometimes there is just only a handful of people left.
But yeah, having more people is definitely helpful for the resilience of any society. Like a small society of Inuit hunter-gatherers of a few hundred people can be wiped out entirely by a big plague, but a society like the Minoan civilisation which likely had a population in the tens of thousands will always have enough people left to continue even if a plague wipes out the majority of the population. Percentages are still more important than bare numbers though. Let's say society A loses 5 million people in a plague, but society B loses 10 million, you would say that society B has been hit harder until you realise that society A lost 90% of its population and society B just 10%. Numbers on their own are meaningless, you need to put them in relative context for them to make sense.

 Grey Templar wrote:
We wouldn't be looking for plague specifically either. A currently unknown disease could still be a factor in weakening the civilization. It could be a disease that is now non-existent because everybody is immune to it, due to those that weren't being wiped out. Heck, it could even be something silly like the Common Cold. Trivial today, life threatening back then. Some foreigner brings in a new disease which kills a small, but vital, portion of the population(like the ruling class who inhabits cities on a permanent basis and thus is more vulnerable to disease) which causes larger government to collapse. The bulk of the population living in small villages carry on life as normal, they're just no longer are part of larger societies.

Pathologies in some cases leave traces on an individual's body however, which archaeologists can discern. Also, big deadly epidemics also leave other clear traces in the archaeological record such as mass graves.
Finally, the common cold wasn't any more life-threatening in the past than it is today. There is just as little cure for the virus today as there was back then. Luckily, it has and always had very low lethality. The average person survives 2-3 colds per year, and there is no evidence to assume it was any different back then (in fact, some of the oldest known medical texts from Ancient Egypt are about the cold). The flu is generally slightly more lethal (it depends on the strain, some are very mild, others are highly lethal), but again that is little different today than it was back then, considering the really lethal varieties are rare and usually quickly die out.
Foreigners bringing in new diseases is something that only happens with completely isolated societies (such as in the Americas). Societies in Europe however have always had widespread contacts with other societies across the continent and beyond and therefore have always been exposed to and developed resistance to a massive variety of pathogens. Which is also why there wasn't mass death among Europeans after they were exposed to New World pathogens (like what happened to Native Americans after being exposed to Old World pathogens). European immune systems were and are just incredibly robust due to that long history of travel and trade.
It is not true that people living in cities are necessarily more vulnerable to diseases. Many diseases are transmitted by farm animals for example, so rural populations are more at risk of contracting those. It is also impossible to make a society collapse by just killing one single part of it (like the rulers). Societies are very adaptable. If the ruling class were to somehow all suddenly die they'd simply be replaced by other people fighting over the now vacant positions of authority. I mean, I guess it could cause a civil war that spirals out of control, with the fighting causing trade to dry up which then combines with widespread droughts and crop failures and an ambitious foreign power that decides to make use of the situation and invade.That could make a society collapse, but even in this highly unlikely scenario that is a lot more than just a disease. Societies don't collapse from diseases, they seem to be at most a contributing factor in the collapse of smaller communities.

 Grey Templar wrote:
Medieval Europe also had more safeguards working to prevent the collapse of society. A shared and organized religion which had a shared textual language(Latin) that was independent of the different governments who were fastidious about saving and recording texts, thus preserving knowledge and history. If there wasn't such a large network of monasteries and churches which kept the ruling classes literate it is likely that the Middle Ages might well indeed have seen a total collapse of civilization like the Bronze Age. First the Roman Empire collapses, and then a series of plagues sweeps through.

You just really angered the Romans. Whose empire did not collapse until the end of the Middle Ages and who by the early Middle Ages had started to use Greek rather than Latin as the primary language of church and government and who might get really offended if you'd say they share a religion with those barbarian pope-worshiping heretics in the West (at least after the 4th Crusade disaster). Medieval Europe did not have a shared religion, Christianity was divided and there were also still pagans kicking around. Latin was just used by a very small group of people, which did not even include some rulers, who were often illiterate themselves and just employed a scribe.
It is extremely doubtful that medieval Europe would collapsed if there had been no monasteries. Medieval Europe was largely an illiterate society (at least in the West, in the Eastern Roman Empire and Eastern Europe literacy was more common, along with other Roman ideas such as bathhouses and proper sewers). Most knowledge wasn't kept in libraries, but in the heads of people, transmitted orally from father to son or from master to apprentice. Books were rare in the Middle Ages, and books that weren't Bibles, Psalters, hagiographies, works of theological philosophy or other religious literature even more so. They did not play a significant role in the transmission of knowledge (apart from theological knowledge of course) for the vast majority of the population until the invention of the printing press made widespread distribution of written material possible.
And for the record, many parts of Western Europe did see a total collapse during the Migration Period. We see that people abandon cities and specialisations to revert to a more "simple" (for lack of a better word) way of life as semi-sedentary subsistence farmers. Which is pretty much the same thing that happens in the Bronze Age collapse. The Black Death and other epidemics however did not cause a social collapse or regression (quite the contrary, it may have driven social change and innovation), but literacy played little role in that since information was transmitted orally rather than through literature. Not to mention that literacy did nothing to prevent the collapse of the Migration Period or the Bronze Age collapse, both periods for which literacy was arguably higher than for 14th-century Europe.

A friend who is a doctor has told me that the majority of human diseases originally came from animals. Thus domestication of animals by humans resulted in an increase in disease. An infamous example is smallpox, derived from cowpox. As the New World had few suitable animal subjects for domestication, the New World had fewer diseases, and so the New World peoples had less developed immune systems as Iron Captain has already noted. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond covers the Germ aspect in greater detail. Overall, the book is a fascinating read.

Something I'd like to ask of Iron Captain and nfe. Not sure how to sum it up, as a question so ... In my college days, a medieval history monograph whose author and title I no longer remember was published. It caused a small stir as the author argued that literacy was far more widespread in medieval Europe than conventional academic thinking would have it. It came down to how medieval Europeans understood the term "literacy", and how modern Western European educated historians understand the term. Modern understanding of "literacy" is of the lowest common denominator; often as little as being able to sign a check or other legally binding document. Medieval European used the term only for the best educated scholars: a rough modern equivalent would be having a Doctorate of Divinity (for the theological aspects) and Doctorate of Classics (for the surviving Classical Latin texts) with a high degree of fluency in Latin. If we use the former standard, there are very few "literate" people in our current society. Conversely, there were probably many more "functionally literate" people in medieval Europe than is normally credited. This seems credible, as while a merchant would not need to discourse on St. Augustine, being able to keep books and write a bill of lading would put him up on a non-literate competitor.

I guess it comes down to, "Are there words/terms that the ancient written sources use that we might be interpreting in a modern fashion that the ancients understood differently, and so distorting scholarship on the subject?

 Ancestral Hamster wrote:
Something I'd like to ask of Iron Captain and nfe. Not sure how to sum it up, as a question so ... In my college days, a medieval history monograph whose author and title I no longer remember was published. It caused a small stir as the author argued that literacy was far more widespread in medieval Europe than conventional academic thinking would have it. It came down to how medieval Europeans understood the term "literacy", and how modern Western European educated historians understand the term.

That actually sounds really familiar to me, but I can't remember the title or author either. Read so many dang articles in school its impossible to remember them all.

Modern understanding of "literacy" is of the lowest common denominator; often as little as being able to sign a check or other legally binding document. Medieval European used the term only for the best educated scholars: a rough modern equivalent would be having a Doctorate of Divinity (for the theological aspects) and Doctorate of Classics (for the surviving Classical Latin texts) with a high degree of fluency in Latin. If we use the former standard, there are very few "literate" people in our current society. Conversely, there were probably many more "functionally literate" people in medieval Europe than is normally credited. This seems credible, as while a merchant would not need to discourse on St. Augustine, being able to keep books and write a bill of lading would put him up on a non-literate competitor.

And this is in part why I remember this article, because I thought this argument was backwards. Modern definitions of literacy are comprehensive. Being able to sign a check is not sufficient to qualify as literate in the modern world by almost any standard (and there are a lot of them, but only third world countries generally make their definition so basic), but the author argued it was which baffled me.

I think his basic argument otherwise made sense. Common peasants probably did know how to read basic signage, numbers, and names and probably functioned better with written words and symbols than they're generally credited.

I guess it comes down to, "Are there words/terms that the ancient written sources use that we might be interpreting in a modern fashion that the ancients understood differently, and so distorting scholarship on the subject?

This certainly. Surprising amounts of historical breakthroughs have come from better understanding words that meant something different then than now. You can see it in even basic things like "gay," "bully," or "liberal" whose meanings in common usage have radically changed just in the last 100 years. Meme has completely changed meaning in a mere 25 years.

It gets even more complicated when you consider how words move between languages. Assassin is derived from Hashishin, which literally means "hashish eater" i.e. druggie. It's amazing how conceptions of the same thing or group of people can be radically different between groups that speak a different language or have a different perspective.

 LordofHats wrote:

I think his basic argument otherwise made sense. Common peasants probably did know how to read basic signage, numbers, and names and probably functioned better with written words and symbols than they're generally credited.

I think the basic concept of seeing a symbol and being able to understand what it means is fairly fundamental - however I would likely suspect that the higher price of things like books and paper might mean that your average serf/farmer/peasant might well understand some basic symbols, but couldn't read a book or write much more than simplistic notations - which might even be down to basic lines for numbers and a cross for their signature.

Even today there are farmers who are very illiterate in developed countries who still get by (these days they often rely on another family member to read for them).

That said the general idea of grading or defining what literacy actually means is quite fundamental to any deeper discussion on historical literacy. Baring in mind most who don't study the subject in depth will have a terribly casual view of the concept (often as not most treat whole ages as a single period in time - the Roman era was many hundreds of years long, yet most don't really see it as a long period but rather a single "roman era" label). Of course these general understandings often filter into the new generations growing up who want to learn things to a deeper level. It's one big reason I dislike how a lot of more advanced academic texts can not only be hard to actually find, but can be quite to very expensive once found.

 Ancestral Hamster wrote:

Spoiler:

Afriend who is a doctor has told me that the majority of human diseases originally came from animals. Thus domestication of animals by humans resulted in an increase in disease. An infamous example is smallpox, derived from cowpox. As the New World had few suitable animal subjects for domestication, the New World had fewer diseases, and so the New World peoples had less developed immune systems as Iron Captain has already noted. Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond covers the Germ aspect in greater detail. Overall, the book is a fascinating read.

Something I'd like to ask of Iron Captain and nfe. Not sure how to sum it up, as a question so ... In my college days, a medieval history monograph whose author and title I no longer remember was published. It caused a small stir as the author argued that literacy was far more widespread in medieval Europe than conventional academic thinking would have it. It came down to how medieval Europeans understood the term "literacy", and how modern Western European educated historians understand the term. Modern understanding of "literacy" is of the lowest common denominator; often as little as being able to sign a check or other legally binding document. Medieval European used the term only for the best educated scholars: a rough modern equivalent would be having a Doctorate of Divinity (for the theological aspects) and Doctorate of Classics (for the surviving Classical Latin texts) with a high degree of fluency in Latin. If we use the former standard, there are very few "literate" people in our current society. Conversely, there were probably many more "functionally literate" people in medieval Europe than is normally credited. This seems credible, as while a merchant would not need to discourse on St. Augustine, being able to keep books and write a bill of lading would put him up on a non-literate competitor.

I guess it comes down to, "Are there words/terms that the ancient written sources use that we might be interpreting in a modern fashion that the ancients understood differently, and so distorting scholarship on the subject?

My expertise stops in the mid-first millennium BC so I'm no expert in medieval literacy, but that does sound entirely believeable. I'm an advocate of abandoning academic titles anywhere other than on a CV as they exist for no reason except othering those who don't hold them steming from medieval interests in separating the elite from their peers and so I find if easy enough to accept that their percieving 'literate' to mean 'expert' or 'familiar with the classics' or something similar as part of the same tradition of marking certain groups out as special.

As a general issue though, yes, LOTS. Some are very understandable: you don't often bother to explain everyday terminology. Lots of everyday products are difficult to identify with precision, for instance, and some things we translate using the same terms as modern things were very different.

For example, in MBA Anatolia, wool and textiles were massively lucrative products and we have a wealth of texts detailing a whole swathe of different qualities of wool but we don't actually know what the authors mean by their qualitative categories. Traditionally they were interpreted as refering to finery of weave in textiles' case - thread count, basically - or to forms of wool fibres but this is really only us projecting modern conceptions of what constitutes fine wool into the past. Every chance it refers to colour, weight, dyes, treatments etc. We see a similar situation around Mesopotamian beer. We translate it as beer and it is a fermented grain drink, but it is also full of bread and not at all similar to the things we've been calling beer for the last few thousand years.

A more immediate, and controverial example is the biblical 'Son of Man'. Theologians spent millennia reading it interchangeably with 'Son of God' but in some modern exegeses scholars have suggested it essentially means 'stand up guy'. 'That Jesus, you can trust him, he's a real son of man!'

The better known, and so tediously trodden over, biblical example is of course the famous ancient misreading of Isaiah where the Hebrew almah was read by the translators of the Septuagint as 'virgin' rather than 'woman who has not had a child'. This led to Isaiah's prophecy becoming that the messiah would be born of a virgin rather than simply being a first born son - and then we got two gospels all about his miracle birth...

Of course, it's sometimes hard to blame folk for these uncritical readings of ancient terms. We're still bad at it with contemporary translation. Not many news sources take the time to contextualise and define kafr before blithely translating it as 'infidel'. Some folks still love to point to biblical verses labelling certain actions as 'abominations' even though shekets would be more appropriately read as 'infrigement' or 'forbidden' without nearly the same weighty connotations of revulsion. Hell, in the modern day we're even still terrible for misreading texts that the authors themselves explained to us. How many people wuote Animal Farm in critiques of communism? You know, that book written by a communist who went to Spain to fight for the communist party and wrote Animal Farmas a critique of noble communism being twisted by Stalin?

So I try to be pretty forgiving when we misread the material left to us from the past dependent on our modern perceptions. So long as we're aware that all interpretations are subjective and innately and unavoidably coloured by our modern cultural contexts then I think it's ok to make errors.

 Overread wrote:
That said the general idea of grading or defining what literacy actually means is quite fundamental to any deeper discussion on historical literacy. Baring in mind most who don't study the subject in depth will have a terribly casual view of the concept (often as not most treat whole ages as a single period in time - the Roman era was many hundreds of years long, yet most don't really see it as a long period but rather a single "roman era" label). Of course these general understandings often filter into the new generations growing up who want to learn things to a deeper level. It's one big reason I dislike how a lot of more advanced academic texts can not only be hard to actually find, but can be quite to very expensive once found.

Yeah. I think that's true of most things, and kind of unavoidable. Anyone who isn't a subject matter expert is going to be somewhere between "wildly ignorant" or "I get the idea well enough."

 LordofHats wrote:

 Overread wrote:
That said the general idea of grading or defining what literacy actually means is quite fundamental to any deeper discussion on historical literacy. Baring in mind most who don't study the subject in depth will have a terribly casual view of the concept (often as not most treat whole ages as a single period in time - the Roman era was many hundreds of years long, yet most don't really see it as a long period but rather a single "roman era" label). Of course these general understandings often filter into the new generations growing up who want to learn things to a deeper level. It's one big reason I dislike how a lot of more advanced academic texts can not only be hard to actually find, but can be quite to very expensive once found.

Yeah. I think that's true of most things, and kind of unavoidable. Anyone who isn't a subject matter expert is going to be somewhere between "wildly ignorant" or "I get the idea well enough."

Nah. Those people are the experts. Most of the process of becoming an expert is learning that having a decent grasp of the idea is about as far as you're going to get. Anyone who thinks they're beyond that is a long way from even a decent grasp.

Guess it depends on how we define get the idea well enough XD To me someone who knows then the Roman Empire was and has a basic concept of where they fit in western history gets the idea well enough. Anything beyond that is probably more than you need in your daily life.